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Farm silence

CLU emeritus professor of English J. T. Ledbetter's new collection of poems, "Old and Lost Rivers," is the winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry.

February 8, 2012

Photo: Brian Stethem

By Kevin Matthews

After his eighth grade year, Jack
Ledbetter was back for a summer visit on the southern Illinois farm where he
was born, "horsing around" with two cousins who were more like brothers to him.
Too soon it was time to leave, again.

The poet and CLU emeritus professor
remembers his farewell to cousin Bill from the backseat of his family's old '38
Dodge.

"It was raining and Bill came up to
the window. And I remember I was starting to cry and I put four fingers up
against the window, meaning ‘four years I know I've got to go to high school
and I'll be back.' Well, I never came back," Ledbetter said.

In the world of Ledbetter's poems,
it is often almost time to lose something or someone important. You might deny that
or hold it off for a moment. You might try to snatch back your loss, like a
woman wading in a river who throws a letter in and thinks twice about it. In
"Old and Lost Rivers," the title poem of Ledbetter's just-published collection,
that woman can't catch her letter. Waters do not back up to explain things like
that; if they did, they might say:

but we took it, along with a big wooden
spoon we carried all the way from the Piney Woods out east, yes, we saw
her... and the man on the other side, watching... we wondered what happened to them...but we
kept moving...

Mournful isn't the only tone in "Old and Lost Rivers" (Lost Horse Press),
as Ledbetter also celebrates places fixed in his memory. Above all, he writes
about the farm in Illinois and Nebraska's Bohemian Alps. Next come the rolling
prairies of the Palouse, where Washington, Idaho and Oregon meet, the setting
of at least a dozen poems.

Ledbetter joined the CLU English
Department in 1970 and continues teaching here beyond his retirement, so the
Santa Monica Mountains have a place in his writing, as do scattered sites such
as the Houston marshes, Mississippi tributaries and the western extreme of the
Canadian border.

Inspiration comes two ways.
Sometimes a word (volvulus) or names (Emo, Jucie) impose themselves, and Ledbetter
joins them with an experience, painting the internal lives of his characters
with a few deft strokes. Other times, when a memory is foremost, he writes
about the emotion that first accompanied the remembered thing, as Wordsworth advised.

Thinking of the farm brings back a
ghost story, the marvelous smell of a puppy's belly, the horizon and the
unknown world beyond it, or "that strange farm silence, a strange silence just
like the farm."

"I wanted that [small farm] life,
but I couldn't have it," Ledbetter said. "I couldn't live it, so I wrote it.
And that pretty much explains it, I think."